A new issue if Fafnir, the Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, has been posted. You can find it here.
In this issue there are two papers by academics from India. That’s impressively international of my Nordic friends. And on the basis of those I really need to read the anthology, Breaking the Bow, which is spectulative fiction stories based on the Ramayana.
So much to learn…
The blurb says:
The second annual Sex and Sexualities in Popular Culture: Feminist Perspectives symposium is returning to the Bristol Watershed in September 2016. Following an exciting inaugural symposium in 2015, this year’s event will continue our tradition of offering a safe, inclusive space for postgraduate students and creative practitioners to meet peers, share work and learn from each other.
For full details, and to book a place, see here.
I’ll be giving a talk. I haven’t quite settled on a title yet, but it will be something to do with trans women as sex objects in the media.
The talk that caused to me walk out of the trans history conference was so bad that almost every slide was either incompetent or dishonest in some way (it can be hard to tell the difference between someone who is just ignorant and someone who is lying for effect). However, one slide I was prepared to give a pass to because I had heard the same point made in a previous talk. It was the slide that said that being “born in wrong body” was an idea that was originally coined to explain being gay.
I should note here that the wrong body meme is not a very useful concept. It totally erases those trans people who are happy transitioning socially without any medical intervention. It encourages a focus on the gender binary, which is unhelpful to anyone who doesn’t want the whole gamut of medical transition options. And of course it is simplistic, which doesn’t help in a subject as complicated as trans people. These days trans activists tend to avoid using it.
Anyway, soon after the conference someone I know on social media asked for more information about this claim, so I did a bit of digging. That’s when things got interesting.
The wrong body meme was first coined by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German writer from the latter half of the 19th Century. Ulrichs was possibly the first modern European to advocate for gay rights. In fact we might describe him as the first gay man, as he was the first person to try to describe being gay in modern terms. The word “homosexual” was coined by his friend, the Austro-Hungarian Karl-Maria Kertbeny, a couple of years after Ulrichs went public with his ideas. Ulrichs himself had used the word “urning” to describe gay men.
It is entirely true that Ulrichs characterized a gay man as an, “anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa” (“a female soul confined in a male body” — he wrote in Latin). However, some very quick Googling about Ulrichs also turned up this:
Ulrichs had a sense of himself as being considerably more feminine than the average man. He recalled that as a young child he wore girls’ clothes, preferred playing with girls, and in fact expressed a desire to be a girl.
That’s a quote from this book. You can read the whole chapter on Ulrichs here.
If you do read the whole thing you will note that Ulrichs lived apparently happily as a man, but deemed himself quite feminine and preferred sex with very masculine men. On discovering that not all gay men were like him, he revised his theories to allow for other types.
So far from coining the wrong body idea because he needed an explanation for same-sex desire, Ulrichs coined it because that’s how he felt about himself.
Now that we have done proper studies on trans kids we know that the majority of children who express non-stereotypical gender behavior do not grow up to be trans. Some grow up to be gay/lesbian, and some grow up to be straight. However, in expressing a desire to actually be a girl Ulrichs exhibited evidence that he was fairly far towards the trans end of the spectrum. That he grew up to be happy as a man (or at least as happy as one could be, being a gay man in 19th Century Germany) suggests he was not all the way along that spectrum. Of course in his day there was no concept of being trans for him consider. Had he been born today, he might well have identified as non-binary in some way.
Of course there are still those who think that all treatment of trans people should be halted in order to save innocent gays and lesbians from being turned trans by the Evil Trans Agenda. There are also those who believe that trans people would be much happier if they were to consent to psychotherapy to “cure” them of their feelings so that they could become gay or lesbian (or stop being androgynephile perverts). And of course there are still doctors who try to cram all trans people into the gender binary. All of these people are dangerous.
What we actually need is for people to be more like Ulrichs and come to recognize that there is a whole spectrum of identities out there, and to allow people to find their own way to happiness.
I’d like to see some more research done on Ulrichs because he seems to be a good example of a non-binary person from European history. Not being able to read German, and being very rusty on the Latin, I’m not well placed to do that.
What I found very sad was to see Ulrichs’ non-binary nature being erased by someone who appeared to identify as non-binary themselves in order to provide another stick with which to beat binary-identified trans people.
Today started off with a lot of international material. Kevin went off to see the paper on trans people in Japan (and discovered that the Japanese language didn’t have gendered pronouns until they started translating English and German texts and had to invent words to make the distinction).
I listened to a presentation by an Indian trans activist, and was very impressed by the government policies in Tamil Nadu. Sadly the rest of India is not so progressive. The speaker made the important distinction between something being culturally accepted and being socially acceptable. Hijra are part of India culture and have been for at least 2000 years, but that doesn’t mean that they are not despised. What is an open question (which I hope one day I can find an Indian historian to help shine some light on) is how much the position of hijra in modern Indian society is a result of European colonialism.
I also got to hear a really great presentation by two trans guys who live in The Yukon. They are dealing with very small communities, which has its drawbacks, but also a significant degree of community support that you don’t get in a big city. I discovered that for First Nations people the word “religion” carries connotations of European colonialism. When speaking of their own beliefs they always use the term “spiritual” rather than “religious”. (To a European, of course, the word “spiritualism” means something very different.)
The next session was given over entirely to a project being done in Calgary on the subject of Magnus Hirschfeld and his relationship to Harry Benjamin and Alfred Kinsey. The scholarship involved is impressive, but when doing work like this there is a serious danger of getting caught up in the narrative created by your subjects. Hirschfeld and Benjamin may well have believed that they were discovering a new phenomenon in human sexuality and had to invent ways of understanding it, but we as historians can’t buy into that idea, or the ways in which they chose to understand transness. My thanks here to the Two Spirit person who chose to challenge the panel on this, and in particular their use of the word “transgenderism”. It is true that the term is commonly used by medical people, but it is also used by TERFs to imply that being trans is a political philosophy that one can chose to reject the validity of.
On the subject of political philosophy, it is an unfortunate fact that in any gathering of trans people you are likely to find someone with entrenched views as to the right way to be trans, and who will push that narrative at the expense of any other. Trans communities are incredibly diverse (a fact which apparently deeply frustrated the arch taxonomist, Kinsey) and it is vitally important that we respect each other. This afternoon there was a presentation from someone who clearly felt that the only way to establish the validity of their own life was to belittle and ridicule other trans people. Not to mention mocking other people’s culture along the way. There is an awful lot wrong with the way that the medical profession has dealt with trans people in the past, and it is absolutely wrong to force everyone into one stereotype of being trans. You don’t have to make that point by making it seem like all people who fit that stereotype in some way are moronic dupes whose feelings about themselves are some sort of false consciousness.
Anyway, I have better things to do with my life that sit around being mocked and insulted. I have Kevin here, and a beautiful part of the world to explore. We found a place called Fisherman’s Wharf, watched the harbor seals perform for the tourists, and ate fish.
Day one of the conference proper saw Kevin and I taking an early morning bus for the University of Victoria. The more I see of this island, the more beautiful it seems, and the university campus did nothing to dispel that impression.
The day began with a paper from Parker Croshaw that was the closest to my interests all weekend. Linguistic theory and comparative mythology are possibly a bit esoteric for a non-specialist audience, but Parker had some very interesting things to say about Shiva. Also any presentation that features dragon-slaying and female Thor is OK by me.
One of my favorite papers from day one was Mary Ann Saunders looking at Ariel from The Tempest. There’s a very good case to be made for Ariel being genderqueer in some way, and I’m rather surprised that more hasn’t been made of this. Mary Ann focused on one such attempt, Julie Taymor’s 2010 film which features Helen Mirren as the mad scientist, Prospera.
Today’s keynote speech was from trans activist, Jamison Green, who is now President of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Jamison is doing great work persuading the medical people to care more about their trans patients.
Despite there only being two streams of programming, I am often finding myself wanting to be in two places at once. That was certainly the case in the afternoon when my friends Jana Funke and Jen Grove were scheduled against presentations on Miss Major and trans pornography.
Not everything went well. The talks are taking place in a room divided by an airwall and there is a lot of sound bleed between the two sections. It isn’t as bad as the infamous 1995 Worldcon, but it is pretty bad at times. Also by no means all of the presenters are good at keeping to time, using a microphone or telling a coherent story. Overall, however, I am very pleased to be here. I have met some really interesting people.
My contribution to the weekend is a poster, which I cunningly had designed for me by the fabulous Ceri Jenkins, who also did all of my PR materials for the LGBT History Festival. I have by far the best looking poster on display. (And people, please, if every you are asked to do a poster, the objective is not to try to cram all of the text of a 20 minute paper onto the page.)
There is lots more good material coming up tomorrow. I suppose I should get some sleep before it starts.
Kevin and I spent most of today playing tourist around Victoria. The weather was beautiful again, and we are both very footsore as a result. Victoria is a beautiful city, and it has loads of bookstores.
Of course today is St. Patrick’s Day and, just like everywhere else in North America, Victoria goes a bit crazy. There appear to be more bookstores than Irish pubs in town, but only just. Faux Irishness was out in force today.
People keep telling me that Victoria is more British than Britain. This is patently not true, because I checked the local paper and there were no headlines screaming English Cricket In Crisis! In fact they didn’t cover the game at all. The paper did, however, preview the conference I am here for. They even mentioned me. Here’s the online version of the report.
Kevin and I spent the afternoon in the local museum, which has some absolutely amazing art done by the First Peoples of the region. There will be photos when I have time to process them.
First People’s art also featured in an exhibition at the art gallery where the launch event for the Moving Trans History Forward conference was held. Obviously for sheer numbers this didn’t match up to Brighton Trans Pride, but there were a lot of trans folk there, and they had come from all over the world.
We were officially welcomed to Victoria by Madison Thomas, a trans person from the Esquimalt Nation, and by Dr. Aaron Devor, who is the only Chair of Transgender Studies in the world. He’s why the conference is here (and I must say he has excellent taste in places to live and work).
There were two keynote speakers. The first was Shelagh Rogers, who is the Chancellor of the University. She’s also a well known radio host on CBC who specializes in talking about books. It turns out that we have a bunch of friends in common, most notably Guy Gavriel Kay. It was clear from Shelagh’s speech that the University of Victoria takes diversity issues very seriously.
The other keynote was by Randall Garrison who is a local MP, openly gay, and a keen supporter of trans rights. I have been following the saga of trans rights legislation thanks to Merecedes Allen. Things looked pretty dire last year, but the federal election seems to have changed all that. Garrison’s bill looks set to be taken up by the Government, which gives it a much higher chance of actually passing.
All in all, it was a very promising start to the event. I was also pleased to catch up with a couple of UK-based friends (hi Jana & Lauren). Tomorrow we get down to serious business. Expect tweetage (because I have been promised wifi.)
My apologies for delving into theory here, but this is rather important and something I need to think through. Writing blog posts helps.
When you do LGBT history you hear a lot about how we must never impose modern ideas of sexual and gender identity on people from the past. A man in ancient Greece did not see himself as “gay” in the same way that a modern man might see himself as gay, despite the fact that both of them have sex with men. Same-sex relations had a very different place in Classical Greek culture than they do in our own.
The same is true of trans people. We might say that a person from the past identified as a kurgarra, a kinaidos, a gallus, a hijra, a mukhannath, a ninauposkitzipxpe, a quariwarmi, a brother-boy or any of a range of other identities, but they would not identify as a transsexual because the word didn’t exist.
That’s fair enough, but inevitably where trans people are concerned the argument gets taken further and starts to be used as an excuse for invalidation of modern identities.
To start with, just because the word transsexual didn’t exist in ancient times that doesn’t mean that trans people didn’t exist. As the above (very incomplete) list of identities shows, people lived lives outside of the gender binary in most (if not all) cultures throughout history. Where we have no evidence it is probably because such people had to stay under the radar for fear of their lives.
A more subtle argument is that because the word transsexual didn’t exist then trans women from ancient times would not have identified as women, they would always have used a local identity that was some form of third gender.
The most obvious point to make here is that gender identity is not a set of discrete boxes you can pigeonhole people into. Take a look at any group of trans people today and you will find a wide range of identities. Many people change how they identify as they experiment with their lives in search of something that they are comfortable with. Even within my lifetime, non-binary was not a socially accepted identity, and gender clinics used to pressure non-binary patients to either leave or adopt a transsexual identity. The fact that non-binary didn’t exist as an acceptable identity didn’t stop non-binary people from feeling non-binary, any more than the fact that the word homosexual didn’t exist didn’t stop men from having sex with each other.
It therefore seems reasonable to me that if you were to be able to examine a group of trans people from the past — say a group of galli from ancient Rome — you would find a whole range of identities among them. That might include people who have become galli against their will, people who seem to us more like effeminate gay men, people whose gender is non-binary, and people who identify strongly as women.
However, there is a deeper and more insidious danger here. If you argue that trans women from the past could not identify as women because the word transsexual didn’t exist, then you are arguing that if you create a society in which the idea of a transsexual doesn’t exist then you can stop trans people from identifying as women — you are postulating a “cure”. And you are claiming that the whole idea of being trans is socially constructed.
Please, cis academic friends, stop doing this.
It occurs to me that I haven’t yet blogged about the Sunday of the LGBT History Academic Conference. That’s remiss of me, because it means that only people on Twitter and Facebook will have seen the above photo. It is from Susan Stryker’s presentation about the Bohemian Club of San Francisco, and yes it does show Dubya dressed as a cheerleader.
Interestingly, Susan’s presentation wasn’t really about trans history. It was about something that looks like it might have a trans element, but is in fact far more about upholding existing social structures, with a bit of hazing ritual thrown in. What cross-dressing there is generally has about as much to do with being a woman as blacking up has to do with actually being black. This is an area where you can make this point clearly, as opposed to the minefield of drag which is much more complicated.
One of the most interesting papers on Sunday was one by Gavin Brown about the Gay Rural Aid & Information Network (GRAIN), which provided assistance and networking to gay men in rural communities in the UK during the 1970s. This being the post-Hippy era, there was good deal of what we would now call Hipsterism going on in addition to actual country-based gay people.
I was very disappointed that the Canadian academic who was due to give a paper on trans life in Trinidad didn’t turn up. Maybe I’ll see if he’s in when I’m in Toronto next week.
I did get to hear a paper by Jane Traies from Sussex University based on her forthcoming book about older lesbians. Kudos to Jane for being open to the idea that some of her subjects might have identified as trans men, had they been born a few generations later. Of interest to me was the fact that around 60% of the women interviewed had been married and many said that they had loved their husbands dearly, but they still identified as lesbians.
After the paper I asked Jane about her lack of use of the word “bisexual”. She said that her subjects almost all insisted that they were not bi, often because of a misunderstanding of what it meant. Apparently some of them thought it meant having sex with a man and a woman at the same time. Then again, I have been reading history textbooks whose authors think that “bisexual” and “hermaphrodite” mean the same thing. *sigh*
Finally thanks again to my pal Catherine Baker for her great paper about how history departments, and indeed universities as a whole, continue to marginalize trans students by never mentioning trans issues in classes or, if they do, doing so in a negative way.
There were some things about the weekend that were less good, which basically boiled down to the fact that running events like this is a learning process, especially for cis people. I have had words. As long as people keep trying to learn and do better I am OK with that.
It seems to be a day for writing about things I am doing. As well as the story, I am delighted to announce that in September I will be a keynote speaker at an academic conference.
No, seriously, I will. The conference is called Sexualities in Popular Culture: Feminist Perspectives (PopSex for short) and is entering its second year. It is run by my friends Bethan Jones and Milena Popova, and takes place at the Watershed in Bristol. Last year was a great success, and hopefully this year will be as well. The call for papers is here. I’m looking forward to some great material.
Of course this does mean that I have to write a speech. No pressure, then.
Well that seemed to go well. I got several very kind comments about my paper on trans people in ancient Mesopotamia and Rome. For those asking, I have a bit of work to do on it, and may get some feedback from my trip to Canada. Once that’s all done I will post it on Academia.edu, probably around the end of March.
The Michael Dillon talk also went well, and most importantly I was able to grab 10 seconds with Tom Robinson to say thank you for all of the great music.
There were lots of other great papers at the conference today. Here are a few highlights.
Jonathan Shipe telling us abut same-sex relationships in the British Army in the Victorian Era. “The soldier was inebriated, m’lud, and as a good Christian I was kneeling down beside him to see if I could help.”
Chuck Upchurch on Byron, the Duke of Wellington and more military queerness. Apparently Wellington did have a soft side. Two of his friends got arrested (separately) on sodomy charges and he stood as a character witness for both.
Kit Heyam explaining how our views of famous LGBT people in history are critically shaped by how they are portrayed in fiction. Marlow has a lot to answer for.
Fiona McGregor on lesbian gangsters in mid 20th Century Sydney (who got away with murder because Aussie men would not admit that a woman could get the better of one of their mates).
In the evening I finally got to sample Manchester’s famous curry district, more than 20 year after reading about it in Vurt. I may have had a celebratory beer or two.
There are two things I am going in Manchester this week. One is giving a paper about trans people in ancient Mesopotamia and Rome at an academic conference. You have to sign up for a ticket for that, but if you are keen to go I believe that there are one or two cancellations so you might be able to get in cheap.
The other one is a repeat of the Michael Dillon talk that I gave in London and Bristol. I have just looked at the publicity for the public talks and…
OMG! OMG! OMG! I am on the same bill as Tom Robinson.
Teenage Cheryl flails wildly.
You can see the whole flyer here.
OK, so I have quite enough to be doing right now. But here are a couple of calls for papers that I am considering responding to.
First up is the academic track of this year’s Finncon. It has the advantage that I am already planning to be there. The theme this year is, “Fantastic Visions from Faerie to Dystopia”, and I have an idea for something to write about. I just need to get my arse in gear and write it.
Secondly there is Fantasies of Contemporary Cultures, a one-day conference at the University of Cardiff. This has the advantages that a) I can get there and back in a day, and b) the keynote speakers are friends of mine (Cathy Butler and Mark Bould). Also the subject matter is right up my street. And it is an good excuse to visit Wales.
No rest for the wicked, as my mother was fond of saying.
The latest issue of Fafnir, the Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, is now available. The English language content includes a paper on ecological themes in fantasy, and a fascinating examination of gender and magic in Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane. There’s also a paper on Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, and a number of book reviews. I’m pleased to see that Jyrki Korpua has completed his doctoral thesis, which is on Constructive Mythopoetics In J. R. R. Tolkien’s Legendarium. Well done Jyrki! There’s a link to the thesis in Fafnir for any Tolkien scholars out there who may be interested.
Next September (7th-10th) the University of Arizona will be holding an international transdisciplinary conference on gender, embodiment, and sexuality in Tucson. I can’t go, of course, because it is in the USA, but it does look very interesting. I was particularly intrigued by this comment in the announcement:
It is our hope that this conference will help launch an international transgender studies association; the conference schedule will include a business meeting to discuss this possibility, and to entertain proposals to host future international conferences.
Oh yes please! And can we have the conference sometimes held in countries that I can travel to?
Anyway, if you are interested in going, the information on submitting papers is on Facebook.
Fortunately one event I can go to is Moving Trans History Forward, which is taking place in Victoria, BC in March. That should be seriously cool. And I get to see Vancouver and Victoria, which I have never done before.
I spent much of day scouring bookstores in Glastonbury for books on Mesopotamian history and religion. I got some good stuff too. Trans history FTW!
The latest issue of Fafnir, the Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, has just been published. This issue has three articles in English: two about Sir Terry Pratchett and one about Michael Crichton.
The Pratchett articles are a memorial, written by my friend Liisa Rantalaiho, and an article about the Wincanton Hogswatch which should be of interest to fan studies scholars.
Please note that this is not the post-Archipelacon issue, so it doesn’t contain any of the papers from the academic conference. Yes Merja, I know I owe you a paper. I need to format the bloody citations, which I’m sure is easy if you are used to it, which I’m not.
It was perhaps not the best timing in the world to be spending last weekend in a hotel in Manchester. I was up in the middle of the night on both Friday and Sunday mornings for events at Worldcon. But there was no way I was going to miss the UK’s first ever academic conference devoted solely to the history of trans people. Thank you so much to Emma Vickers and Liverpool John Moore University for putting it on. Here are my impressions of the event.
The keynote speech was given by long-time trans activist, Stephen Whittle. He treated us to a personal account of the history of trans activism in the UK — some of which he was very much a key part of. Stephen is an experienced speaker with a wealth of entertaining and illuminating anecdotes. My favorite was the one about the UK branch of the Transsexual Action Organisation dissociating itself from the US parent organization, in part because they claimed that the Americans were “into the Occult”. I’m pretty sure that means that a lot of the Americans were neo-pagans.
There were seven papers in all, including mine. I’m going to highlight the three I found most interesting.
First up, Jacob Bloomfield, who like me went to great lengths to be there. He is performing at Edinburgh Fringe at the moment. He caught an early train down, and left immediately after giving his paper so that he could be on stage at 8:00pm. His paper was all about cross-dressing revues put on by military veterans after the two world wars. Apparently there were quite a few. Danny La Rue was the most famous graduate of them. It isn’t clear whether anyone involved actually identified as trans, but the circumstances under which they were permitted by the authorities were quite interesting. The fact that the performers were all military veterans was apparently a key issue here as it established their essential virility. There was to be, according to one censor, “no pansy business”. Fascinatingly Jacob suggested that some British people found the idea of Tommy watching men dressed (very convincingly) as women preferable to the idea that he might hook up with some foreign woman while busy saving his country overseas.
Clare Tebbutt had a great paper about “sex changes” in the 1930s. These were nothing like the gender clinic work we know today, though they did center primarily around Charing Cross Hospital. A South African doctor called Lennox Broster became something of an expert in what we’d now call intersex conditions. Many intersex people who had been assigned female at birth were treated by him and a significant number were legally reassigned male as a result. His most famous patient was Mark Weston. The media of the day, having little understanding of the biology, reported these cases as “sex changes” and put them down to the miracles of modern medicine. Reporting was almost always favorable towards the patient, with scare quotes being used for the birth gender rather than the new one. Because of Broster’s particular specialism, the vast majority of the patients were seen as female-to-male, so we don’t know much about how a perceived male-to-female would have been reported, but the media climate then was clearly very different to what we see today.
(By the way, the history of such cases is why Michael Dillon was able to get his legal gender changed so easily, even though he had no intersex condition. The doctors, and the authorities, were used to such cases.)
Finally, my favorite paper of the day, Juthathorn Pravattiyagul on the Thai trans diaspora. Juthathorn is Thai herself, and she has done a lot of research hanging out with Thai trans women in various European cities. Acceptance of trans women is seen as much better in the West than in Thailand, because we have laws protecting us and Thailand doesn’t. That, combined with the obvious economic incentives, has caused large numbers of Thai trans women to emigrate to Europe. Juthathorn has found that the reality of life in the West rarely matches up to their dreams. Partly that’s because of racism, but in addition she found that social attitudes towards trans women are far less accepting in Europe than in Thailand, despite our more supportive laws. I so wish I had known about her work before I put in my submission to the UK government’s Transgender Equality Inquiry as I would have cited her.
It was also great to hang out with friends such as Emma Hutson and Catherine Baker, and to make new friends. I can warmly recommend the 60 Hope Street restaurant that Emma Vickers found for the conference dinner. However, I do have a few concerns about the way trans history is being done.
The majority of the attendees were cis people. Some of them were great. Others clearly don’t quite get it, and it you are doing trans history that’s important. I absolutely accept the idea that we can’t know how people from the past identified. I opened my own paper by saying so. Even if they did, their self-conceptions are likely to be very different from those of a modern trans person such as myself. However, just because we can’t say for certain that person X from the past identified as trans, or as the gender in which they presented for most of their life, we can’t say for certain that they didn’t. To persistently use the birth gender for all subjects, and to characterize them all as cross-dressers, is to erase the possibility of people being trans in the past. Given that the idea that being trans is a modern invention is a key part of TERF ideology, this is deeply political position to take. It is not, as I suspect most of the researchers assume, simply a neutral and default position.
It gets worse too. People do cross-dress for all sorts of reasons. Just take a look at any stag party, Halloween party, Saturday crowd at a Test Match and so on. There are so many more cis people than trans people that my guess is that there were more people in history who cross-dressed and did not identify as trans than there were those who did. Even with eunuchs, who are physically trans, there will probably be more who continue to identify as their birth gender than as anything else. If your “trans history” is focused on the idea of cross-dressing rather than on the idea of trans identities, then you will end up writing a history of cis people and calling it a history of trans people. I do not want to see us go down that route. Hopefully most of the academics involved don’t want us to either.
Well that was fun. Some really great papers, and mine seemed to go down well too. I’ll write more about it tomorrow, but I have to be up at 3:30am for the Hugo Award Ceremony so I’m going to bed now. If you want more of a flavor of the event, check out the #HistTrans hashtag on Twitter.
Tomorrow I’ll be off to Liverpool where I will be delivering a paper at the Historicising Trans Symposium at John Moores University. I’m looking forward to seeing some old friends (well, friends I have know for a while who are much younger than me), and to meeting a bunch of of new scholars who are into trans history.
My own paper is going to look at problems with the evidence for the existence of trans people, focusing on cases at the Court of Versailles and in the Inca Empire. As this is a trial run for a paper I want to give at a much bigger conference in London next year I probably won’t put it on academia.edu just yet. Sorry, you’ll have to wait a bit.
Sadly all of my friends in Liverpool seem to be on vacation right now, but as you will see from the next post that’s probably just as well.
Every so often my academic friends tweet about interesting books and papers. I got one this morning (thanks Olivette!). The book in question is Sexuality and Gender Politics in Mozambique: Rethinking Gender in Africa by Signe Arnfred, who I think is Danish. There is a review of the book at Feminist Review, and what caught my eye was this comment:
Arnfred argues that in the same way that race, a ‘social, political, economic relation of domination, is reinvented as a biological difference, thus naturalized, [w]hat happens to “gender†is very similar: a social relation of male domination/female subordination, brought along with the European colonial powers and supported by Christianity, is represented as a biological difference between men and women, with the “natural†implication, that women are subordinated in relation to men’ (pp. 185–186).
This is very similar to the argument I have made about the erasure of trans people from non-European cultures. Obviously with trans folk there may be some biology involved, but the simplistic and incorrect understanding of that science by Victorian-era Europeans is what caused the problem.
So, another book I need to read. I do wish that academic books were not so expensive.
I spent Friday in Exeter at an event billed as a Variant Sex and Gender, Religion and Wellbeing Workshop. It was run primarily by academics who study intersex people, but there was plenty of trans involvement as well. The event was hosted by Exeter University’s Centre for Ethics and Practical Theology. I do like the sound of “practical theology”. More on that later.
Obviously most of the people involved were Christians. There was one Buddhist and one Jew amongst the speakers. Some of the audience may have had other religious allegiances, but I don’t recall anyone other than me mentioning that.
The day opened with a presentation online from Dr. Stephen Kerry of Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, who identifies as genderqueer. His paper was mainly about the difficulties of engaging the intersex community, though he talked a bit about Buddhism as well. More on that later. He also confessed to being a science fiction fan, so I guess he and I will be talking a lot in future.
Next up was the Reverend Dr. Christina (Tina) Beardsley who is a trans woman and head of the Multifaith Chaplaincy at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital NHS Trust. She talked mainly about how evangelicals have poisoned the Church of England’s attitude towards trans people, and her hopes for improvement.
After an excellent lunch, we were treated to a superb presentation on being a religious transgender Jew from Max Zachs (whom some of you may remember from My Transsexual Summer). Max was really good. More on that in a little while too.
Finally Maria Morris, the Clinical Team Leader from The Laurels, Exeter’s Gender Identity Clinic, gave the cis folks in the audience an update on the current state of treatment protocols. I knew all of that anyway, but it was so good to see it officially confirmed. The treatment of trans people by the NHS has come a very long way since I transitioned.
So what was the importance of this event? Obviously I have an historical interest in the involvement of trans people in religion, but the key is in that term “practical theology”. Whether you like it or not, large numbers of human beings have religious beliefs. Most of them belong to faiths that are currently strongly transphobic. While I was at the conference, my Twitter feed lit up with discussion of the latest pronouncements on trans folk by the Pope. There’s some push back from devout Catholics that he’s being misrepresented (he does, after all, only issue pronouncements in Latin), but it is still very worrying. Given this, I think it is absolutely essential for trans activists to engage with people of faith. There are those who support us, and from a practical point of view I think we are far more likely to convert some to our cause than we are to end religion.
Also, as Tina pointed out, trans people are often in need of a great deal of emotional support. If they are religious themselves, and can get help from supportive people with spiritual authority, that has to be a good thing. Sadly they are unlikely to get it from anyone else. One of the points that Max made in their presentation was that their left-wing friends had provided no support for Max’s attempts to become a rabbi, partly because many of them felt that all religion was the enemy, and partly because some were anti-Jewish on principle.
The reason I loved Max’s presentation so much is that they made such a good argument for using theology to make the case for trans people. They started off by emphasizing the importance of ritual and tradition in Judaism, and noting that the penalty for desecrating Shabbat is death. Nevertheless, Judaism exists in the real world, and rules adopted thousands of years ago may not work so well these days. Max noted that there are now many exceptions to the rules for Shabbat that allow Jews to do things like phone an ambulance if a family member has a heart attack. The point is that theological arguments can and have been made to change religious laws, and trans Jews have been busily working away to make their faith more welcoming to gender variant people.
This, by the way, is not new. Max provided examples from the Talmud giving advice to mothers of obviously intersex children. We’ve been discussing other things about the original Hebrew version of the Old Testament as well. Some of this may find its way into my history talks.
Stephen’s comments on Buddhism highlighted the importance of context and translation when discussing historical attitudes towards gender variant people. Some Buddhist texts contain prohibitions against “hermaphrodites”. As someone who studies intersex people, Stephen is naturally concerned about this. However, he’s aware that the word “hermaphrodites” may have been used to mean something quite different. My research suggests that, prior to the 19th Century, it could be used to mean trans people, and even gay people. In a Buddhist context, any prohibitions could be a response to the widespread use of eunuchs in China and Vietnam, or it could be in reaction to Hindu faith groups that were accepting of trans people.
Finally I want to talk a bit about the term “intersex”. As I noted earlier, several of the academics at the conference (including Stephen Kerry) study intersex people. There was some debate as to the acceptability of intersex as a term. I’m not intersex-identified myself, so it is very important to me to use terms acceptable to the intersex community when I’m talking abut them.
Given that I keep using “intersex”, you will have guessed that I think it is still the preferred term. That’s because activist organizations such as UKIA and OII use it. Nevertheless, Stephen and his colleagues are being told that the term is offensive. The alternative term is DSD. That normally stands for Disorders of Sexual Development, and I know that any mention of “disorder” tends to be greeted with fury by activists. Some people apparently claim that the first D stands for “differences”. That sounds a little weasely to me, but I am open to being corrected by intersex activists.
Having made a few inquiries, it appears that the people pushing for the use of DSD rather than intersex are medical professionals and support groups run by the parents of intersex children.